INFORMATION SOCIETY TECHNOLOGIES (IST) PROGRAMME

1. INFORMATION SOCIETY TECHNOLOGIES (IST) PROGRAMME Contract for:Shared-cost RTD Project acronym SAFE TUNNEL Project full title: Innovative systems and frameworks for enhancing of traffic safety in road tunnels Proposal/Contract no.: IST – 2000 – 28099 Operative commencement date of contract: 01/09/2001

2. Project abstract • SAFE TUNNEL main objective is to contribute to reduce the number of accidents inside road tunnels by preventive safety measures. Main focus is to achieve a dramatic decrease of the “fire accidents” which, although rare, are the most serious safety risk inside tunnel and in particular inside mono-tube Alpine Tunnel as the Frejus Tunnel. • Basic ideas are to increase the knowledge of the vehicle status in order to avoid the access into the tunnel to those vehicles with detected or imminent on-board anomalies and to introduce measures to achieve the control of the speed and the distance between the vehicles in tunnel. • Work specific objectives include: • Development of two demonstrator trucks equipped with preventive diagnosis devices, tele control and HMI facilities • Development of the control centre to manage SAFE TUNNEL applications; • Analysis of the needs of tunnel operators for managing safety related operations with electronic devices • Analysis of driver needs for on-board Human Machine Interface; • Transmission of data in the Frejus area (tunnel comprised) by a public telecom network (GSM/UMTS) • Demonstrations of SAFE TUNNEL concept by field tests at Frejus Tunnel; • Evaluation activities include: Technical & Impact analysis, User Acceptance estimation, Socio-Economic impact estimation & Cost Benefit analysis; • Recommendations for Standardisation bodies;

3. Project Objectives SAFE TUNNEL main objective is to contribute to reduce the overall number of accident inside road tunnels through preventive safety measures. From a recent study (1999) of PIARC (Permanent International Association of Road Congresses) , the average frequency of fires in tunnels is higher than 25 per 100 million vehicle kilometres (number of vehicles * km), while for a group of tunnel (e.g. Frejus, Mont Blanc and Gotthard) this frequency is much higher, especially of fires involving HGV and greater than that of passenger cars. Concerning Frejus Tunnel, in the year 2000 happened 482 incidents of which 281 were due to mechanic failures, 82 were caused by fuel tanks empty, 23 involved property damage only accidents , 1 was a collision involving 1 injured person, 34 were fire incidents and 47 were incidents which had other or unknown causes. In measurable terms, the objective of the project is to introduce measures capable of introducing in the Frejus tunnel a reduction of the number of HGV incidents of the 40% within 10 years and a cut of the 50% the frequency of fires in tunnels within 6 years. . To achieve this objective, SAFE TUNNEL aims to enhance safety inside road tunnels through the introduction of a set of preventive safety measures made possible by the integration of on board vehicle devices and ITS infrastructures. 3

4. This integration vehicle-infrastructure shall be achieved at three levels: SAFE TUNNEL shall develop or adapt existing on board vehicle sensors to monitor main vehicle functions in order to forecast and detect anomalies to on board devices. This information will be transmitted to the control centre managed by tunnel operator through a public telecommunication network. SAFE TUNNEL shall develop a control centre to receive and to process the information transmitted by equipped HGV and by infrastructure-based electronic system (when the vehicles are not equipped). The objective is to determine a strategy to prevent unsafe situations inside the tunnel both for equipped and not equipped vehicles. The preventive actions enabled by the control centre consist of the access control at the entry point and the control of the vehicle speed together with enforcement measures. SAFE TUNNEL shall develop the “tele-control” of the equipped vehicle by the automatic actuation on board vehicle of the speed recommended by the control centre and transmitted to the vehicle and shall study the possibility to install inside the tunnel an infrastructured system capable of showing a light beam which drivers of not equipped vehicles must follow (The moving spot light concept) 4

5. SAFE TUNNEL plans to carry out the following activities: Vehicle level: Development of two demonstrator vehicles to be provided by Renault and by IVECO. Main functions of demonstrator vehicles are: - Implementation of a diagnostic system for checking the proper functionality of main mechanical (engine, brakes, power train, transmission, Tires…) and electronic devices (Advance Cruise Control, ABD ESP, communication system…) and capable of forecasting vehicle failure well in advance. - Implementation/adaptation of a system to control automatically the speed of the vehicle acting on the brake and the acceleration systems. Infrastructure level Development of a control centre which shall integrate as input the diagnostic data transmitted by the vehicles and the alarms provided by existing (not funded) ITS systems which are: - alarms of the Automatic Incident Detection System (AIDS);- alarms of the thermal check system;- alarms of the ventilation system.The control centre will be installed in the control room of the Frejus Tunnel operators (SITAF and SFTRF) where today is operating the surveillance system ( equipped with fixed video camera every 200 meters in both directions). As output SAFE TUNNEL shall provide the recommended speed for the tele-control application, shall activate the access control measures to stop the potentially dangerous vehicles, shall alert the emergency services in case of potential danger detected by the sensors inside the tunnel and shall issue warning messages to the drivers on-board vehicle. 5

6. Communication Level • The communications between vehicles and infrastructures shall be achieved by a public communication network, the two demonstrator vehicles and the control centre will be equipped with RX/TX devices. The Frejus Tunnel operators are working with both French and Italian mobile telecom operators to provide GSM coverage which is planned to be provided by the end of 2002. Since Telecom Operators plan to start commercial service with UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) in January 2002, also UMTS has to be considered as communication technology. The choice of a public network rather than a private network comes from the consideration that in most of EU Member States mobile phone penetration increases very rapidly, it is likely that in the next few years the cellular link will be present almost in every vehicle passing through the road tunnel. • Opportunity and objective reasons suggested to limit the development phase to the field of commercial vehicles; these reasons are mainly three: • Higher potential danger of commercial vehicles (from studies of PIARC the Fire intensity and the Fire capacity of a HGV is much higher, from 10 to 30 times, to a passenger car); • Today the commercial vehicles represent the biggest share of transit traffic via Frejus Tunnel (In 1999 were 1.5 millions of trucks and 1.1 millions of passenger cars); • Budget and time limitations. • Nevertheless SAFE TUNNEL will not neglect other vehicles. User needs and system concept will also take into account the needs of passenger cars. 6

7. Conclusions The activities planned are aiming to demonstrate in a real test site the full feasibility of the cooperative approach proposed. A key of success of SAFE TUNNEL is to understand if the so called “Intelligent Tunnel“ concept which has been pursued by SITAF and SFTRF takes a tangible value added when cooperating with an “Intelligent Vehicle”. The presence of layered information subsystems, located at vehicle, infrastructure, control centre levels and interconnected together by a telecommunication system (such as UMTS), increases benefits, but on the other side increase the overall system complexity and vulnerability to hardware and software failures. The availability of safety functions and services of the overall system will be characterised and measured to prevent its vulnerability through appropriate technical analyses originating from high tech sectors. The analysis will be more concentrated on the complexity of the interconnection and composition of subsystems and on the impact of design errors in delivering the system safety functions. Finally the industrial, research and management capabilities present within the consortium will be integrated by the opinions of a user interest group (both operators and end users) of the road tunnel. This interest group together with additional participants will be involved in a virtual forum called “SAFETY INSIDE TUNNEL” managed by SITAF and SFTRF. From an operative point of view this forum will consist of a web site which shall contains information concerning tunnel safety and tunnel management together with the main results published by the project. The participation to the forum will be open to other relevant organizations in charge of safety and tunnel management, invited by SITAF and SFTRF. 7